Re: xpath - check for no content

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Subject: Re: xpath - check for no content
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:57:09 -0400

At 2002-07-29 17:43 +0200, sascha wrote:

simple question i guess:
How do i check if the <run> element or one of it's childsren does not have
any content?
Meaning that there is no output text or so inbetween.

In your example below, you do have text in between ... you have text nodes comprised only of white-space characters.

example:
<run>
<font size="17pt" style="bold" name="Arial" color="red"/>
<break/>
</run>

I tried...

If the white-space *is* significant, just check the value of the current node:

<xsl:if test=". = ''">

If the white-space *isn't* significant, trim leading and trailing just in case the input was "lazily" empty:

<xsl:if test="normalize-space(.)=''">

Note this is a common problem where users *think* an element is empty, but they've inserted a new-line to make the indentation look nice, not realizing they no longer have an empty element.

I hope this helps.

.................. Ken


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Current Thread
xpath - check for no content sascha - Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:39:46 -0400 (EDT) G. Ken Holman - Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:57:50 -0400 (EDT) <= sascha - Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:06:32 -0400 (EDT) Joerg Heinicke - Tue, 30 Jul 2002 08:00:43 -0400 (EDT) sascha - Tue, 30 Jul 2002 08:35:11 -0400 (EDT)

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